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Loving Coffee Without Being a Drip

James Freeman with Kyoto machines at Blue Bottle Coffee.Credit
Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times

THE crimes that can be hung on the automatic drip coffee machine are many, not all of them petty misdemeanors. It hogs counter space. It sends a wash of water too indiscriminate over a hillock of grounds too large. And its oversize carafe often overheats its contents, turning your morning upper into an acrid downer.

But I’ll say this for crusty old Mr. Coffee and his shinier, snazzier progeny, which I kept using long after any self-respecting epicure was supposed to: None of them ever spat scalding liquid into my eye.

The Chemex glass coffee maker did. It’s a one-piece carafe/cone combo, fetchingly shaped like an hourglass and fully vetted by the coffee cognoscenti, who assured me that it would ask for just a modicum of extra effort and answer that with coffee bliss. Into its upper half a multilayered paper filter is supposed to be tucked delicately, emphasis on the delicately. I did so hastily and clumsily, and then carried my clumsiness over to the arrangement of coffee grounds and pouring of hot water, and suddenly there were bubbles and a geyser and ... yowza! My right eye burned and shut tight, and a dark future as an abashed Cyclops stretched before me.

The pain quickly subsided, but not the questions that accompanied and had, in fact, preceded it. How much pinpoint labor do we owe the gods of culinary discernment? In these food-mad times, have the economically privileged among us gone too far in turning simple acts of nourishment into complicated rituals of self-congratulation? Must all shortcuts and conveniences be subject to so much epicurean bullying and such internal shame? I could be talking about instant oatmeal instead of the real stuff or jarred tomato sauce rather than something that has simmered for hours.

To choose the lesser route is to see the sanctified finger of Alice Waters wagging at you and to hear the Olympian voice of Thomas Keller saying tsk-tsk. A food lover with pride and values is supposed to care more.

He is certainly not supposed to countenance automatic drip coffee, as I did, on and off, until nearly a year ago, when I finally threw out my machine. I never mistook automatic drip for the best that I could do, just as I never considered the overbearing brew made from over-roasted beans at Starbucks, which I occasionally patronized, to be optimal. But for me coffee was first and foremost a caffeine delivery system. It was medicine, just as food, stripped of its pretensions, is fuel. Expeditiousness mattered.

Acquaintances disapproved of my approach and attitude, lording it over me with their ostensibly superior coffee-making methods and confirming just how much self-identity and self-definition go into every aspect of ingestion these days. You are how you caffeinate.

The tribes are myriad and the choices many, especially outside the home, where the coffee connoisseur casts his or her lot with a particular roaster (Intelligentsia, Counter Culture, Stumptown, Blue Bottle) and then decides whether to abide coffee made in batches or insist it be produced cup by cup. Café Grumpy affords the latter option, courtesy of an $11,000 Clover machine, with which brew time and temperature can be adjusted according to the beans being used.

In deference to how very far coffee culture had evolved since the days of Mr. Coffee, I tried to evolve, too. I turned to the French press. It made discernibly fuller-bodied coffee than the automatic drip had. It also made me feel that I’d established some crucial baseline of virtue, in that it required patience and labor: the heating of water, the stirring of grounds, the minutes-long wait before the plunge.

Then one day my friend Jonathan Rubinstein, a kindly coffee savant who owns the venerated Joe coffee stores in Manhattan, inquired after my home coffee practices. And shook his head ruefully.

Photo

These days, you are how you caffeinate.Credit
Image Source/Superstock

The single-cup pour-over method, as he called it, was what I should use. He promised me it wouldn’t be much more work. He offered me a lesson. He repeated the offer.

And when I clumsily (yes, an established theme at this point) broke my French press a few months later, I marched into a Joe store, where a barista named Mike Morgenstern awaited me. He pulled out a white ceramic cone, the Dripper V 60, which is made by a Japanese manufacturer, Hario, and usually sells for between $15 and $25. He placed it atop a coffee mug. And he took me through the paces.

I was to pluck a Number 02 Hario white paper filter (from a package that was certain not to be available in my corner bodega), put it into the cone, presoak it with hot water to remove any paper taste, discard the water and, only then, put two rounded tablespoons of freshly ground beans into the filter.

“Freshly ground?” I sighed. There’s only so much I can accomplish in advance of the administration of caffeine.

He said I could get away with beans ground no more than a few days earlier.

As he continued to show me the way, he poured just an ounce and a half of hot water over the grounds, “to get what’s called the bloom,” he explained. The grounds indeed swelled, flowered. “You’re letting the gases escape,” he said, so that the coffee would have a cleaner (and, I supposed, less flatulent?) flavor.

Fully 45 seconds later, he poured another 10 ounces of water. But not all at once: slowly, with pauses and “in concentric circles,” he noted, so that the grounds were used evenly. This took about another minute.

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A nearby customer who had been watching with a growing expression of worry piped up, saying, “I kind of like my French press.”

“Unfortunately,” Mr. Morgenstern told her, “it’s seen the end of its heyday, according to the coffee specialty industry.”

We were also watched by another customer, Rob Kohn, 48, a computer software designer with his own coffee-making rituals. A firm believer in presoaking paper filters, he has at times presoaked scores of them at once for use later. He has also tried specifically shaped cloth filters and a generically shaped “coffee sock,” which, he explained, “I cut into the shape I wanted and then re-sewed.”

His sock and cloth filters, he said, were stored “in a Ziploc bag in the refrigerator” and kept clean with an occasional soak in hydrogen peroxide.

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Shinto Imai and the Clover maker at Café GrumpyCredit
Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

He congratulated himself on setting limits. “I haven’t done any of the vacuum siphons yet,” he said, describing some elaborate technology with multiple glass compartments and a halogen flame. It sounded like the very death of pleasure.

Relative to that, my Hario single-cup pour-over system was endurable, though I’m as likely to make do with just one cup as Donald Trump is with just one high-rise. And the coffee had a noteworthy smoothness, freshness and balance of opulent and astringent notes. For my second and third cups, I occasionally skipped the filter soaking, gassy blooming and concentric circles, and the results weren’t outrageously inferior.

Then came a Saturday morning when I was making coffee for two, each of us interested in at least two cups. There was so much serial water heating, filter soaking, blooming and pausing — and so many concentric circles — that I felt chained to the kitchen counter, less coffee server than coffee slave.

I will travel far, pay top dollar and even wait a half-hour on the sidewalk for a superior porterhouse or sublime sliver of sushi. But for me personally, was the pleasure of a higher grade of coffee worth the price? In this instance, couldn’t I depart from the orthodoxy (nay, tyranny) of the artisanal?

I made a tweak. The $40 Chemex, which adapts the pour-over method to the production of four or more cups of coffee at once, promised to save me time. But it still required me to wait for a teakettle to heat water. I found its designated paper filters — different, of course, from the Hario’s — unwieldy. And then there was the matter of my temporary blinding.

Mr. Rubinstein said that I was inserting the filters incorrectly and had to hold one flap just so, with certain creases facing down. “Then,” he said, “you put in the beans you’ve just ground.”

I told him that Mr. Morgenstern had given me permission to skip the grinding. Mr. Rubinstein said it was “the most important thing.”

I bought a grinder, shelling out $115 for the Maestro, which, according to experts, crushes rather than slices beans, as those rudimentary cylinders do, and has 32 settings, for better “particle-size control.”

Make no mistake. Combine Maestro-ground beans with a proper execution of the pour-over system and you get lovely coffee: a delicate symphony in place of a blunt cymbal crash.

But let’s pause and imagine something just as magical.

You stumble out of bed, struggling toward consciousness, in urgent need of caffeine. You drag yourself into the kitchen. And there, ready and waiting, are 10 cups of coffee, brewed automatically, just five minutes earlier, as a consequence of a few simple steps and some alarm clock-style programming the night before.

This isn’t cutting-edge technology. This is Mr. Coffee, many decades ago. The current generation of automatic drip machines preserves the tradition while improving, I’m told, on the product. Gastronomic guilt be damned, I just may put one on my Christmas list.

Correction: December 8, 2010

The De Gustibus column on Nov. 24 about coffee makers referred incorrectly to the Maestro coffee grinder. It crushes beans; it does not slice them.

De Gustibus is an occasional forum for opinion, argument or provocation in reflections on food or drink.

A version of this article appears in print on November 24, 2010, on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Self-Respect, One Drop At a Time. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe